The Art of PEACE in MEDELLIN.

• Author: Pratt, Timothy
• Position: Colombia

Renowned Colombian artist Fernando Botero recently donated works worth $200 million to his homeland to encourage cultural growth and an end to violence

It was a breezy, sunny June day, much like spring up north, in this tropical city known, fittingly, as "the city of eternal spring." Forty-nine poets from twenty-five countries were all over town--in parks, auditoriums, museums, corner stores.

There was a poet from Switzerland, another from Cuba. There were poets from Bulgaria and Japan. It was the fifth annual International Poetry Festival of Medellin, one of the biggest events of its kind in the world. For several days, over meals at the hotel, these workers of words had been commenting on the stark contrast between the attentive, even adoring crowds of up to ten thousand that showed up wherever they spoke, and their impressions of Medellin before arriving. Wasn't this the city with one of the highest murder rates in the world, the home of the drug cartel whose ruthless boss, Pablo Escobar, had been shot off a rooftop only two years earlier?

Then, on the fourth day of the festival, a bomb exploded. It blew holes through a bulbous, bronze sculpture in a downtown plaza three blocks from the hotel, and took the lives of twenty-two people who happened to be nearby.

The sculpture was of a dove, the symbol of peace. Five years later, the artist who made the dove, Fernando Botero, says he's "no longer angry" about the bombing. In fact, he has given the city another dove, as well as a stunning gift of two hundred of his own paintings, several dozen of his sculptures, and works from his private collection, including some by Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Degas, Dali, Matisse, Picasso, and Klimt.

The gift is worth an estimated $200 million. Millions were also spent on two museums to house the works--one in the capital city of Bogota and another in Botero's hometown, Medellin. A sculpture park in front of Medellin's museum rounds off the artist's donation.

In a sort of self-imposed exile for fifty of his sixty-eight years, the artist made rare extended visits to Colombia last October and November to inaugurate the two museums. During an interview several days before launching the new Museum of Antioquia, in Medellin, Botero recalled the bombing. "I was driving down a highway in France in June 1995, when there was something on the radio about a bomb, Botero," said the artist.

"I couldn't believe it! I stopped in Monte Carlo, called the mayor and told him, `replace the sculpture.' Then the next day, the guerrillas issued a communique saying they had targeted me for being `a symbol of oppression,'" said Botero. (Colombia has had two guerrilla armies at war with the state for nearly forty years.)

"And I don't even keep a maid here!" he continued--referring to a common practice, even among members of the middle class. "I was so mad, I called back and said, `leave it there, as a symbol of the stupidity of violence.' It took a while to get over that."

But he did. And the story behind his launching two museums in one month in...